Skis and ice skates have long remained a preferred choice for unpowered personal stand-on vehicles for recreation and competitive events, when and wherever available, subject to climatic and seasonal limitations. These vary in north America and globally, ranging from far-away relatively unpopulated polar regions where skis and ice skates, along with snowshoes, become routinely essential for personal mobility, to populated tropical regions where natural ice and snow are unknown and where skating/hockey rinks and ski resorts are few and far between.
For many located between these extremes, the pleasure of skiing is a luxury to be enjoyed if and whenever available, typically within the time slot of a short season, even if it involves the time and expense to travel to a ski resort. Professional and competitive skiing continue to enjoy progress and popularity, however, many skiers, frustrated by the severe limitations on time and availability to practice skiing, would welcome a viable way of keeping in condition during the long off-season, this unfulfilled need is addressed by the present invention.
Understanding the key points of novelty of the invention, which are subtle, mechanically complex and not immediately obvious or intuitive, requires detailed focus on particular aspects of state-of-the art skiing, unpowered stand-on land vehicles including wheels, wheel mounts and bearings, and known art skiing simulators, relating to the present invention.
Skiing: The invention relates particularly to downhill skiing, ranging from (a) gliding slowly down a shallow slope in a linear travel path requiring only minimal skill level, i.e. little, if any steering (apart from emergencies such as confronting a tree or rock), and only ordinary balance, as in standing and walking, to (b) zig-zagging rapidly down a steep slope, involving frequent maximally-sharp turns, e.g. in its extreme form, slalom competition, which demands the maximum available human skill levels, including muscular body movements co-ordinated for ongoing rapid abrupt changes in balance, momentum, force translations, etc. Instruction, training and practice of skiing, and simulation relating to the present invention pertain primarily to skills and techniques of steering, ranging from incremental changes of heading to sharp cornering.
At the highest skill levels in state-of-the-art downhill skiing mechanics and techniques, when making a “right hand parallel turn”, the skier gradually rolls and tilts his skis over to the right, “banking” the skis and the skier for the turn, in the manner of “banking” curved railroad tracks and train vehicles; simultaneously the skier gradually “skews” the skis from toe-to-toe rectangularity by moving the inside (right hand) ski forward in relation to the outside (left hand) ski. The skis in turn gradually bend into an increasingly closed arc and the metal edges of the skis begin to “carve” a “right hand turn”. To complete the turn the skier gradually untilts the skis back to level while gradually moving the inside ski back until it arrives at a “neutral” position with the skis again rectangular (toe-to-toe) and flat on the snow, ready to travel on in a linear path or begin another turn, which if “left hand” requires similar but symmetrically opposite movements.
Unpowered stand-on land vehicles of interest regarding the present invention, as candidates for skiing simulation (having become associated with the youthful portion of the population due to the automobile) have evolved from once-popular rollerskates and scooters, as minor would-be rivals of skis, skates and snowboards, to the present predominance of skateboards, accompanied by a high degree of skill achievement of skateboarders and related enhancement of skateboards due to research and development. In the evolution of rollerskates, 2-wheeled attempts to simulate ice skates yielded to 4-wheelers for safety and ankle comfort, strapped or clipped onto, or made integral with the shoes.
Wheel mounts for attaching the front and rear rollerskate wheel pairs to the shoes evolved from firmly affixed to some degree of flexibility for tilting to facilitate and enhance turning, leading to the widespread use, in the present day skateboard predominance, of highly developed wheel “mounts” or “trucks” that couple a skateboard to the axle of a wheel-pair via an angled swivel arrangement that enables the user to steer by tilting the skateboard laterally for making turns, much in the manner of making turns in skiing as described above, wherein each ski is “banked”, i.e. tilted by the skier to “carve” a turn. However, the all-important “skewing” technique described above for skiing turns cannot be simulated by a single foot-platform such as a skateboard, or by a pair of foot-platforms affixed together or uncoordinated.
Low-friction bearings developed for wheels and rollers of rollerskates and skateboards facilitate and enhance free-wheel coasting and sustained zig-zag self-propulsion on a level surface, unattainable in snow-skiing due to the higher effective friction involved in turns, even with skilled turn “carving” as described above.